AURIN (Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network) provides support to Australian researchers, planners, and policy makers to inform evidence-based decision making. The eresearch facility enables critical decision making for Australia’s future growth, sustainability and urban planning. AURIN provides a range of online tools and services to support spatio-statistical analysis and data visualisation. Known as Australia’s single largest centralised online resource of clean, integrated, spatially enabled, research-ready data – AURIN enables users to transform data into valuable insights.

AURIN continues to support research platforms such as The Regional Innovation Data Lab (RIDL) to strengthen capacity and broaden the capability of Australian researchers. This research builds thriving communities and fast-tracks innovative solutions by providing policy makers, practitioners and researchers with data to solve real world social planning problems and address long-standing urban and regional challenges. Facilitated by AAF’s seamless login, RIDL accesses baseline data from AURIN to build dashboards like Redlands Service Mapping and exploring the food environments in South East Queensland.

Without AAF’s single sign-on capability, social planning collaborations between academics, policy makers and industry professionals are made considerably more difficult due to access barriers. By connecting the AAF, AURIN and RIDL users from all backgrounds can seamlessly access data and analysis tools to help accelerate research into our towns, cities and communities.

The AAF is Australia’s identity federation and part of a global network of over 74 federations around the world. AAF provides federated identity services that are used by every university in Australia and CSIRO. It is globally recognised as a world leader in enabling researchers to securely access Australia’s National Research Infrastructure as well as global research infrastructure and collaborations.

“A primary consideration for AURIN is FAIR data access in a safe and secure manner for its research community. This requires high-quality trusted security solutions to be in place”, said Professor Stuart Barr, AURIN Director. By leveraging the AAF to provide researchers across Australia with authenticated access to these data resources and tools, users can find the ‘right answer’ to Australia’s social planning problems.

Email [email protected] to find out how the AAF can help reduce access barriers for your research and organisation, to help maximise your research capability.